An Award-Winning Legacy

Often referred to as the "father of modern finance," Nobel laureate Gene Fama has had a well-known and widespread impact. From the start of his career to the many contributions he continues to make each day, Fama has influenced those around him in multiple ways.

We celebrate 50 years of Fama's achievements, including the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, as well as the impressions he has made by sharing insights, leading by example, and by his dedication to the University of Chicago and Chicago Booth.

Below, you can find a collection of stories that, together, honor Gene Fama's legacy - representing the man, his work, and the impact he continues to have on the world at large.

Researcher

"I certainly believe that his research revolutionized the world of investing. It was theoretically sound and enormously important and that was the standard that we all strived for."

- Gary EppenDirector at HUB Group, Inc.

"There is a fair amount of academic research that is way too mathematical for its own good. Things are teased out of the data that aren’t really there because very high-powered techniques are used, and the economics become obfuscated because the math is being shown off instead. Gene can do more math than a lot of people would guess - he knows his stuff. But Gene uses the simplest technique necessary to make his point - no simpler - which makes his papers and his research far more about economics and far more insightful and far more readable than much of the rest of the literature. I wish it would catch on more than it has. But I think Gene is rather unique, working often with Ken [French], and being able to take things that are complicated and not make them more complicated, but make them clear."

- Cliff AsnessManaging and Founding Principal, AQR Capital Management

"Gene has been influential far beyond just the specific discoveries that he’s credited with."

"What I like about his approach is that he gets to the real heart of the problem. When the financial crisis broke, Gene took a strong view. We had to use economics and financial analysis to interpret that was going on. At the time, a lot of people tended to panic, saying, 'We have to abandon everything that we know - it is a whole new world.' But he took a very different point of view and tried to interpret what was going on with the tools we had. I think it was very refreshing to do that. People like people who qualify and dodge on a lot of issues, but that’s not Gene’s temperament, and I don’t think that’s the way you get important research done in any field, including economics. He says it, and he’s forthright about it, and that’s why it's controversial. We have a kinship in that respect. When you’re doing controversial research at the same university you feel a certain bond with each other even though you may be working on different problems and I’ve felt that bond with Gene Fama."

- Gary BeckerUniversity Professor of Economics and Sociology

"I think that his ideas have permanently changed the way in which a large number of people think about share prices and markets in general."

"Gene’s research style is quite unorthodox compared to research before his, in the sense that he follows what the data tells him. There were a bunch of new ideas going on in finance when he was in graduate school and a lot of them were being developed around the University of Chicago. Fama's serious research - and the fact that this school was a place where the absolute best finance research had been done - was the reason I was so excited to come. I didn’t have to think about it for more than a second to accept the offer to come here. Fama followed up on those ideas, figured out how to take them to the data, and then figured out what the data was telling him - he's probably the most empirically minded researcher of that era. Gene is just the most serious researcher that I know. What he does has become somewhat standard, so he's the new orthodoxy."

"I would say the thing that I like best about Gene’s approach to research is that he’s always working on practical problems ... He’s totally committed to whatever he’s doing, but he picks interesting and important problems - that's what he’s motivated by."

- Gary EppenDirector at HUB Group, Inc.

"Gene’s such a rigorous guy - deeply interested in getting things right, in helping everyone around him - and he sets standards in every part of his being that way. He really is a man of integrity."

- Michael Jensen Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus at Harvard Business School

"I met Gene in 1963. I was interested in the statistical properties of stocks unfolding through time, and Jim Lorie told me that was Gene’s dissertation topic. So, I met with Gene, along with Merton Miller, and Gene showed me the shape of the distribution he’d uncovered, which was far from a normal (Gaussian) distribution, and I was flabbergasted! As for Merton - never had I met anyone who had such a grasp of finance. Merton and Gene were like father and son: Gene was developing the empirical skills, and Merton had the conceptual frameworks to go with it. I also recall the project funded by the Bank Administration Institute to evolve a coherent means of measuring investment performance. Larry Fisher demonstrated 'time-weighted' rates of return, while Gene worked on risk. Risk wasn’t even a topic of discussion among investment managers back then, so the supplement Gene wrote was a killer, and the stage for risk measurement in the pension fund community morphed into use everywhere."

"As a researcher, Gene is fastidious about the independence of observations and test statistics in his data. At one workshop, a prominent former faculty member presented a paper based on seven observations. Gene’s opening comment was: 'I tell my students that they should not calculate more test statistics than there are observations in their sample. You have more tables (eight) than observations!' But Gene is no stranger to challenging orthodoxy. There is a story, probably apocryphal, about Gene as a part-time MBA student. In one of his classes, the professor required that students undertake a project to value a well-known NYSE company. Gene handed in a paragraph with a reference to the closing stock price in the previous day’s Wall Street Journal. In several succinct sentences, Gene pointed out that the aggregated opinions of those buying and selling the stock were surely more reliable than those of a student with a major in French."

"I would point to Gene’s research linking the market-efficiency concept to empirical investigation and emphasizing the role of equilibrium models in that link. Two path-breaking articles in this vein are especially memorable. The first is the 1969 article with Fisher, Jensen, and Roll, generally recognized as having launched event studies as a methodology that has since been applied countless times to investigate the impacts of events and decisions on corporate value. The second is the 1973 article with MacBeth. In addition to its being the classic empirical investigation of the fundamental risk-return theory in finance, their study also invented Fama-MacBeth regression - a methodology still widely used in empirical research. Researchers may long debate the extent to which the efficient-markets hypothesis holds. That Gene has laid the seminal empirical foundations for investigating the hypothesis is without debate."

- Robert Stambaugh Miller Anderson and Sherrerd Professor of Finance, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

"Gene's research has a laser-like focus on getting to the truth of what is going on in financial markets, and his ideas have become the very paradigm by which academics and practitioners think about financial markets. His work is responsible for moving the study of finance from opinions and storytelling to rigorous scientific scholarship, and the quality of this empirical work is unrivaled and has set the standard by which empirical work in finance is evaluated."

- Francis LongstaffAllstate Professor of Insurance and Finance, UCLA Anderson School of Management

"Fama introduced the efficient markets hypothesis as a natural way to think about the progress of asset returns. It is not a blind belief in the efficiency of the markets, rather, the efficient market hypothesis serves as the natural alternative hypothesis any time one wishes to test a different hypothesis as an explanation of the behavior of asset returns. The efficient market hypothesis has withstood the test of time remarkably well. It has taught me to look first for rational explanations, such as the equity premium puzzle, before I look for more exotic explanations. I do not blindly believe in the investor’s rational behavior, but your rational behavior is the natural alternative hypothesis to test against any other hypothesis that one wishes to put forth as an explanation of the behavior or asset returns. Market rationality has also withstood the test of time remarkably well."

- George ConstantinidesLeo Melamed Professor of Finance

"In all of my empirical work, I use Gene’s style of careful and fully developed considerations of alternatives. I still enjoy and learn from reading or rereading his work, whether the research just finished last month, last year, or in the past. He is a terrific expositor of ideas that, although extremely deep and important, become crystal clear when he puts them to paper. There are few researchers who stick to the underlying belief that markets are the best alternative to myriad other seemingly easy choices to explain phenomena. And the supreme compliment to Gene’s work is that so many continue to use and cite his research, and those others who criticize his past research do so with ultimate respect and worry, rightly so, that Gene is correct."

"In the early '90s, when I was working in Chicago as a PhD student, I was looking at stock return data produced by the Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP). I found that they had left out returns for firms that got delisted from an exchange, and that potentially could have changed some of the inferences we were making using that data. I told Gene, and he was skeptical - in part because he knew the data very well, but he also knew the people at CRSP, who were pretty careful researchers. Then we ran into Steve Kaplan, who had checked on the data after hearing from me, and Steve saw that they were missing as well. So Gene got confirmation that his prior belief about the CRSP data was wrong, changed his mind, and then became interested in what the implication was. Gene is a guy with extremely strong beliefs, but his beliefs are really driven by the data. He’s like a scientist interested in the truth - willing to look at the data and change his mind when the data really warrants it."

- Tyler ShumwayProfessor of Finance, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan

"Gene's doctoral dissertation became very famous; it was published, and he’s continued to do seminal research ever since. It’s very unusual for somebody - an academic - to continue to make contributions for their entire career like he’s done. I think he's the most widely cited economist of all people in economics - not just in financial economics. You can see by the citations alone that he’s made many contributions over time. And he continues to do so - he's still working."

"Gene’s work has had a tremendous influence on the type of work that I do. He (with his long-time co-author Ken French) was instrumental in pushing the size and value effects in asset pricing, and more generally the empirical approach to asset pricing—an area that I’ve focused my work on for the last 15 years. I’ve been extremely fortunate and benefited from having long conversations and debates with him on this and other topics, but it is his work that has really been a blueprint for the kind of work that I and others have tried to do and will continue to try to do. Besides the whole Fama and French series, which has just had a huge impact on the profession, the stuff he wrote back in the early ’80s on uncovered interest rate parity and foreign exchange and forward contracts is now influencing me today. Every time I venture into a new research area, there’s a Fama paper laying the groundwork for how to think about it. It just really doesn’t stop, and that’s not unique to my own experiences. I think that’s true of the entire profession—Gene’s influence pervades almost every aspect of modern finance".

- Tobias J. MoskowitzFama Family Professor of Finance

"Gene has been a remarkable empiricist in the best sense of the term. His clever and valuable combination of empirical tractability and sound economic reasoning paved the way to a much more complete understanding of how asset markets are connected to economic fundamentals. He has produced valuable and robust characterizations of asset market data, including his work with Ken French. His empirical findings are interesting and revealing because of Gene’s economic acumen. They are robust because of Gene’s meticulous and thorough analysis. It is remarkable the extent to which Gene’s contributions have played central roles in setting agendas for major bodies of research in financial economics. The empirical nature of much of it has opened the door to some important econometric advances as well. Gene led the way to a better and more profound understanding of the empirical underpinnings of market efficiency in stochastic environments."

- Lars Peter Hansen David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, Statistics, and the College

Colleague

"I like to have colleagues who are innovative and are not afraid to state their opinions even when they’re controversial. I think that attracts students ... it attracts the good faculty ... and it makes for a much better and exciting intellectual atmosphere at the university."

- Gary BeckerUniversity Professor of Economics and Sociology

"Gene's work has impacted me in his strongly empirical style, his ability to communicate things, and his insistence in communicating ideas in the clearest possible way. Also in his no-nonsense approach and in how he evaluates other work, which is always incisive. It’s not personal, but you don’t get many pats on the back around here. Gene’s led in that way, and that’s influenced exactly how I try to do things. I wish I could write with his speed, clarity, and incisiveness."

"Gene was a very disciplined fellow and very much committed to his research, his students, and the school in general. He was always in his office, typically working, but very accessible to other people. I always felt that I could knock on the door, walk in, sit down, and talk to Gene about anything that was on my mind. And probably for about the last 10 years that we were residents in Rosenwald Hall, Gene and I had offices next to each other - I considered that to be a real bonus."

- Gary Eppen Director at HUB Group, Inc.

"Even though we don’t work in the same fields, that [intellectual atmosphere] does affect everybody who is involved in economics, broadly conceived in finance as a part of a broad field of economics."

- Gary BeckerUniversity Professor of Economics and Sociology

"He got me started in this profession, and I’ve had a very enjoyable and long career. I really owe him a lot for having him be the inspiration for that and also for being a good friend for all these years. He and I are good friends, our wives are good friends, and it’s just been a very fantastic half-century for somebody to know somebody as high-quality as Gene - it’s really great."

"I came to the Booth School in 1979 as a rookie assistant professor just finishing his PhD. Gene was well established as one of the giants of modern finance, yet, from day one he treated me as an equal. It was clear that this was not work to Gene, but truly the proverbial labor of love. He also welcomed debate about his work and the work of others. All of those traits are still present in Gene’s behavior - he treats his colleagues with respect and continues to seek answers to deep questions in finance. Moreover, he is able to separate his opinion of your work from his opinion of you. It is never personal - he is as demanding and critical of his own work as he is of others’ work. Also, somewhat unusual among academics of his stature, he readily confesses when he determines that some of his earlier ideas were wrong or misguided. Perhaps his time on the golf course has increased recently, but he maintains that has been more than offset by productivity gains in his research!"

"Gene has been my colleague for over 30 years, and I have learned much from him in a variety ways - he is a joy to talk to about economics and finance. He has had a profound influence on many PhD students I've known by advising dissertations or serving on committees. Overall, Gene has set a phenomenal example for scholarship at the highest level for a long period of time. He is a truly unique scholar, role model, and intellectual leader of financial economics at the University of Chicago."

- Lars HansenDavid Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, Statistics, and the College

So when you’re a colleague of Gene Fama’s you learn a lot. Not just from what he says, but more from what he does.... This is a guy who despite his fame and all the publications he’s had, he still works harder than most people, he still loves the research and continues to write. He never stops, he never quits."

- Tobias J. MoskowitzFama Family Professor of Finance

"I have been a close colleague of Gene since the late ’70s when I arrived at Chicago. Gene is a no nonsense guy who keeps you on your toes. He is open to discussing anything, but whatever you say, be prepared to back it up with sound reasoning and solid evidence. So, every day, whether at the finance workshop or during our frequent conversations, I felt that I was learning something precious. I feel the same way to this day. Gene has been a role model and inspiration for me."

- George Constantinides Leo Melamed Professor of Finance

"Professionally, I am proud to be able to call him my colleague. There is no doubt that my research (and my teaching) benefitted enormously from having Gene as a role model. Additionally, the quality of the faculty at Booth would be nowhere near the level it is but for Gene’s magnetic appeal to other researchers in finance, accounting, and economics. Personally, I consider Gene a good friend. I enjoy his wicked sense of humor and I share his cynical view of politics and politicians. He is an avid and highly knowledgeable sports fan, and we delight in 'Monday morning quarterbacking' at lunch time. I wish I shared his passion for golf, and I forgive him for his (totally uninformed) low opinion of cricket."

"Collaborating with Gene on a paper in 1969 was a delightful experience. Gene actually suggested the topic of that paper to Dick Roll and me. And to look at stocks and dividends, with the new data set that had just been made available through Chris - it was delightful. So Dick and I wrote up what I'm sure was a very crude and rough version of the course, and then Gene got involved as a full coauthor, and it eventually spawned a minor industry of bench studies - as they were called. It was delightful working with Gene: very rigorous, very disciplined, and couldn't have been better. It was very educational."

- Michael JensenJesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus, Harvard Business School

"I noticed that Gene had the incredible ability to quickly extract the essence of a research article and assess its contribution to the knowledge base of its field; what was amazing is that he was able to do this in any of the fields important to business education. My most important goal for the 13 years I was deputy dean for the faculty, then dean, was to maintain and, hopefully, to improve the research and teaching culture of Booth, so appreciated and ably articulated by Gene himself. The hiring and promotion decisions are key to this. Whenever a tough case in any field had to be considered, Gene was asked to be on the committee. He never demurred; he continually showed unerring judgment and taste on what the school needed. So thank you, Gene, for providing Booth's 'heart and soul' over 50 years and for decades hence."

Teacher

"Within 10 minutes in his class, we had covered everything I knew about finance and were onto new territory. It was a life-changing event to be in his class and listen to his clear and insightful thoughts about what was important in financial markets."

- Francis LongstaffAllstate Professor of Insurance and Finance, UCLA Anderson School of Management

"What appears to be effortless in the classroom is not effortless - it’s a combination of mastery and a great amount of effort."

- Cliff AsnessManaging and Founding Principal, AQR Capital Management

"He's always the same person - it's always about getting to the truth. It's always about being precise. So he teaches much the same way."

- Tobias J. MoskowitzFama Family Professor of Finance

"When I was at the University of Chicago, you had to present a paper by the end of your third year, just to prove that you could do some research. We would usually do two students at a time in the seminar, but it turned out that nobody else was ready to present a paper, so I was alone with a 90-minute slot where I've only got 45 minutes of material. So in the seminar, Mert Miller sat on one side, with Gene on the other, and Mert really didn't like my paper at all. Then other people jumped in, and after 10 minutes I was just standing there with 80 minutes of seminar to go. Gene had his arms folded, a smile on his face, and there was this long silence. He looked around the seminar and says, 'Okay, you guys don’t like his idea, do you have a better one?' There was a pause, and then it was like a cue for the junior faculty to actually speak up. It became this conversation - a debate of ideas - and it was incredibly important for me because, eventually, that discussion lead to my dissertation."

- Cam HarveyJ. Paul Sticht Professor in International Business, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University

"He would give you useful suggestions, but he wouldn't take any nonsense, and students need that."

- Gary BeckerUniversity Professor of Economics and Sociology

"One of the most important things I learned from Gene Fama is to have a healthy respect for data. In our field, there are sometimes highbrow econometricians and lowbrow econometricians. The highbrow econometricians do fancy models with lots of math in order to correct for potential problems in the real world. The lowbrow econometricians make sure that their data makes sense and often just look at relatively simple statistics to learn the truth about the world. I learned from Gene a lot about the value of lowbrow econometrics. I was always stuck in seminars where people would talk about financial data, past stock returns, their results in estimating various statistics with this data. And I think Gene had studied the data so much and knew it all so well that he could almost guess what kind of coefficients people would get from their models, what kind of estimates they would come up with. He's not the kind of guy who was going to make a mistake in the data, and that taught me to be very careful with it."

- Tyler ShumwayProfessor of Finance, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan

"If you want to take one of Fama’s classes you better be serious. He understands the things that he’s talking about and can express them in a very clear way. Being a non-finance guy, I had the advantage of him explaining various things to me, so I think he would be an absolutely great teacher - and look at the number of students that have taken his PhD series and gone on to great careers and loved the course. I don’t think there is any worry that Gene isn’t a terrific teacher."

- Gary Eppen Director at HUB Group, Inc.

"He really makes the students read the papers and think about them, and gets them thinking in ways I hadn't seen anyone else do before."

"I came to Chicago as a student knowing little about economics and financial economics. Gene was willing to spread his knowledge generously and with great excitement - he was so happy that others were learning. I think his students learned a tremendous amount from his classes and his interactions. And, he was - and still is - willing to take as much as he can from those with whom he interacts. Without Gene and Merton Miller, and other professors at Chicago, I would have never built the framework necessary for me to conduct my own research and grow as a researcher. That was wonderful."

"Being a student in his classroom was inspiring. When I walked into his class for the first time, I thought I knew a lot about finance since I had received my undergraduate degree in it. Within 10 minutes in his class, we had covered everything I knew about Finance and were onto new territory. It was a life-changing event to be in his class and listen to his clear and insightful thoughts about what was important in financial markets."

"I took his course in my first quarter as an MBA student, having come directly from a small liberal arts college where I’d never heard of Eugene Fama or finance as an academic discipline. I think I spent much of the course somewhere between overwhelmed and intrigued. My recollection of the class includes lively discussions that I rarely had the nerve to enter, figuring nobody but Gene came out of those looking very smart. I also remember lugging around his book Foundations of Finance as a manuscript. Had my introduction to finance not been through Gene, I may well not have become a finance professor. He made the academic study of finance seductive. Whether as a classroom teacher, dissertation advisor, or faculty colleague, he was not only a valuable source of advice and feedback, but he was also a great teacher by example. He personally exemplified finance as an area unique within economics in allowing rich sources of data to nourish the interplay between theoretical and empirical research. "

- Robert Stambaugh Miller Anderson and Sherrerd Professor of Finance, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

"Gene is extremely generous with his time to his students and colleagues but he expects them to be as dead serious about research as he is."

- George Constantinides Leo Melamed Professor of Finance

"The impact Professor Fama has had on the way I think about markets, as well as the impact he has had on my career, is enormous. His class was awesome. I knew nothing about finance when I took his course on asset pricing (I learned what short-selling was from a footnote in his book). The idea of taking this famous class from a legend in the field was intimidating; however, Professor Fama built up all of the theory of modern finance from scratch. It was incredibly challenging, but you really didn’t need to know anything beyond basic math and statistics to understand what he was doing. I was part of a group of finance PhD students who went over to the dark side (Goldman Sachs) instead of going to academia. There, our first job was to come up with forecasts for different types of investments. The material that we learned from Professor Fama served as the basis for our forecasts. Since then, we have pretty much been doing the same thing - building our careers and our business around these ideas."

- John LiewFounding Principal, AQR Capital Management

"Well he’s a lot of fun. He’s got a lot of insights. Of course he’s very demanding ... We had to write a term paper in that course which turned into one of the most widely cited papers in finance."

Mentor

"I consider Gene a big mentor. Gene would never admit to being a mentor. I think he’s generally against mentoring. But Gene is a mentor by setting a great example for what it takes to do serious research and focus on getting answers exactly right. So he’s the lead-by-example type of mentor, and that’s probably the best type."

"Basically, throughout my career, Gene has had an imprint on the way that I think about research."

- Cam HarveyJ. Paul Sticht Professor in International Business, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University

Lasting Mentorship

"I’ve known Gene Fama for a long time, in many ways. I started out taking his class, I was his teaching assistant for a couple of years, and then he was the advisor of my dissertation committee. You end up working fairly closely with someone when in those situations. Then I've kept up with him over the years - the respect has been there, and he’s a wonderful man."

Recognizing a Mentor

"Many things that are special you only realize in hindsight. I’m not claiming I was that bright of a 25-year-old, but I think even back then I realized I was being mentored and advised by one of the giants of finance. One thing about Gene that isn’t obvious from far away is that he takes great interest in his students. He cared about my work; he gave very direct comments. You learn to appreciate honesty with Gene - he’ll tell you what he thinks - but having one of the giants of finance as your mentor is an amazing experience, and it’s just grown over the years."

- Cliff AsnessManaging and Founding Principal, AQR Capital Management

"Gene spent winters with the UCLA finance faculty in the 1990’s, so I’ve known him ever since I was a grad student there. In 1998, I was lucky enough to get a job at Chicago, and I’ve been a colleague of his ever since. The kind of research I do and the kind of scholar I hope to become, I’ve always admired and strive to emulate Gene Fama’s work. He’s been more than a colleague to me. He’s been a mentor. In addition to my advisors at UCLA, Mark Grinblatt and Dick Roll (one of Gene’s first students), Gene has really taught me—by both his words and his actions—almost everything that I know."

- Tobias J. Moskowitz Fama Family Professor of Finance

"I think one of the most important things I learned from Gene was an attitude toward research as a profession. I’m not too sure whether he knows this, but his influence on my life was enormous even before we ever met. He is one of the major reasons I came to Chicago as a graduate student in 1966 - I'd heard about the exciting things that he was doing. I arrived, took his classes with Merton Miller, and I observed that Gene was an ultimate professional. I also learned an enormous amount from Gene at the time about modeling share price behavior in terms of flow of information to the share market. It was novel at the time, and he was the person who pioneered that way of thinking. That had a very, very large impact on me, my career, and my research throughout my career. He was a remarkable role model in that sense."

"The Fama-Miller Center is named for Gene Fama and Merton Miller as the people who established the tone in finance at the University of Chicago Booth School, and Gene helped us with the development of the center. He also helped us when we were figuring out what activities the center should undertake, and whenever we talked to alumni about what the center would be about, Gene was a tremendous help in coming to talk and explain why the center was so important to research and finance here at Booth. So Gene has been a tremendous help in making the center great, and it’s a wonderful honor to have his name and Merton Miller’s name on the center."

"I don’t think we thought of each other as mentors, but there have been several young guys that have come into the school and done extremely well. Some of them are big names in their own right now. Perhaps top of the list is Ken French - he came in, and he and Gene established a working relationship and have gone on to publish all sorts of important papers. Toby Moskowitz is another great example. His office was in the same one with Gene’s and mine. Gene’s impact on those kinds of guys is huge."

- Gary Eppen Director at HUB Group, Inc.

"Gene was very busy when I was there as a PhD student, but he mentored me nonetheless, in comments I would get back from my papers, things that he would say when I would present in a dissertation proposal or defense, and in his classes. So he wasn’t the kind of mentor that you hang out and have lunch with, but he had such insights into the profession and the data, it was extremely valuable to get written comments from him."

- Tyler ShumwayProfessor of Finance, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan

"I was Fama’s teaching assistant in my second year finance course. It was a mixed blessing – not because of Fama’s legendary directness, but rather, I regret not taking full advantage of collaborating with the man whose theories changed my own way of thinking and the world of finance in general. Every afternoon I would go into his office and he’d hand me pages of handwritten notes of stuff he wanted me to work on. I felt like I was taking this guy’s money - he’s working harder than me. I don’t think I’ve met anybody as competitive as Gene in my whole career, and one doesn’t usually think of that competitiveness when you think of professors. Fama’s combination of drive and brilliance convinced me that maybe academia wasn’t for me after all. He was smarter than I was and willing to work harder - how was I ever going to compete with people like him? I thought there must be more like him out there. I didn’t realize he was unique. Fama took the news in stride, and helped me find my first job."

- David BoothFounder and CEO of Dimensional Fund Advisors

"Gene’s style is quite unorthodox, and he invents the style. It becomes orthodox - once Gene does something, everybody else follows."

"His personal style of being available to others, to enjoy giving of what you know, has influenced my behavior in a positive way. He was willing to give of his time to help me work through ideas and find order in my chaos. He could deduce salient points from the information that I provided. I always wanted to discuss my work with Gene because his comments were on point and made me think much more deeply about my analysis. And I always enjoyed his standard of excellence - I have always felt that I should go where the best are and steal as much as I can from them. Gene was - and is - the best. I stole a lot from him, and I thank him for that."

"I can't imagine any faculty mentor being more inspiring than Gene Fama was for me. He personally guided me and helped me improve my research, which admittedly needed a lot of help. He was patient and encouraged me to do better. I am incredibly grateful for his influence. I am deeply honored to have been one of his students and feel a responsibility to live up to his example and try to reach the same high standards of scholarship in my own work as he has exemplified in his."

"As with most students at Chicago, my introduction to Gene was in his class. Getting written comments from him hours after he received your working paper is unquestionably Gene. He eventually became my dissertation advisor, and I was a rookie professor who was slow to finish my dissertation. Gene spent some of his precious time chasing me down, ultimately reaching me at home in the Philadelphia suburbs while I was doing some yard work. My mother, visiting at the time, answered the call and evidently asked its purpose. She summoned me with, 'Someone from the University of Chicago is on the phone. He says he’s your dissertation chairman and wants to know why you haven’t finished it.' As I arrived at the phone, she added, 'I told him you’re working really hard on it.' Later, I joined the Chicago faculty. In that sense the relationship moved from mentor to colleague, but I still envision him more as the former these many years later. The biggest cost of my decision to leave Chicago has been not being around Gene."

- Robert Stambaugh Miller Anderson and Sherrerd Professor of Finance, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

"We could count citations of Gene’s published papers and come up with his greatest hits, but that misses the essence of Gene. Gene’s contributions transcend the ideas in those papers - he has a way of thinking and an approach to problems that are rare. He knows his data like no one else I have observed. Furthermore, by his actions and insights, Gene has had a phenomenal impact on developing young faculty - many of whom are here at Booth and others who have left Booth for peer schools. Anyone who observes Gene’s behavior at workshops and seminars has had an object lesson in how to conduct scientific inquiry. He is not afraid to ask seemingly naive questions or to challenge orthodoxy. He abhors complexity for complexity’s sake, and his razor would give Occam’s a good run for its money."